The United Kingdom concluded the forced expulsion of the Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago.
The extremely remote mid-ocean Indian Ocean islands were originally uninhabited, but came to have a population when under French administration. The original population was enslaved, and brought by the French from Madagascar and other African locations. They were emancipated in 1840, the islands having belonged to the United Kingdom since 1814. They were employed as workers on coconut plantations, that being the primary economy of the islands.
The British depopulation campaign was undertaken for the United States, which sought to use the islands for military purposes. The best known of the islands is Diego Garcia, which remains a U.S. Naval installation.
L. Patrick Gray resigned as Interim Director of the FBI after it was revealed he destroyed materials removed from E. Howard Hunt's safe. He spent the next seven years providing testimony regarding Watergate.
Gray was a 1940 Naval Academy graduate who attended law school while still in the Navy. His naval career was distinguished, and he was discouraged from leaving the service when he did in 1960, meaning that at that time he'd had a twenty-year Naval career.
He was a recent appointee to the FBI when the Watergate scandal broke out. Initially he was heavily involved in the investigation and pursued it vigorously. When it became clear the administration was involved, he turned the matter over to his deputy, Mark Felt, who later turned out to be the famous leaker to the press, "Deep Throat".
According to Gray, who does seem to have had no involvement with the Watergate conspiracy or its cover up, the papers he removed were told to him to be of national security significant. Prior to destroying them, he examined them, and later stated that one set of papers were "false" secret cables indicating that the Kennedy Administration was involved with the Diem assassination and the second set papers written by Kennedy about his "peccadilloes".
